Gukurahundi Victims' Monologues, State Silences and Perpetrator

Issue 32, July 2020 Zimbabwe: Gukurahundi Victims’ Monologues, State Silences and Perpetrator Denials, 1987-2017 Terence M. MASHINGAIDZE Abstract: The Zimbabwean government instigated Gukurahundi massacres resulted in the death of around 20 000 people. The majority of the victims belonged to the Ndebele ethnic group while the Fifth Brigade, a Shona dominated military outit, were the main perpetrators of the mass killings. The atrocities ended with the signing of the Unity Accord of December 1987 between the ruling ZANU (PF) party, which had masterminded the atrocities, and the opposition (PF) ZAPU, whose supporters had borne the brunt of state highhandedness. After the cessation of hostilities the Zimbabwean government frustrated open conversations and public commemorations of the massacres. What conversations on Gukurahundi that took place were largely victims’ monologues. To interrogate this state instigated silencing of exposure and remembrance the article suggests an exigency for counter-narrating erasures of memories of harm and impunity. In the aftermath of massacres, I argue, harmed communities embolden themselves and coalesce their fractured senses of self by openly memorialising their collective suffering through open conversations about their shared victimhood, commemorations, and the assembling of monuments. The Robert Mugabe led government’s foreclosure of such avenues for public acknowledgements of mass injuries that are supposed to serve as visceral registers of what societies should remember to avoid in the future reveals its disregard for the wounded humanity of the constitutive political other. Thus, Gukurahundi as an historical episode reveals the pathology of mass harm silenced and Terence M. MASHINGAIDZE rendered insigniicant by the state. Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Midlands State University, Zimbabwe; Keywords: Zimbabwe, Gukurahundi, Massacres, Research Fellow, Denialism, Victimhood, Silenced. University of South Africa. Email: mashingaidzet@staﬀ .msu.ac.zw Conlict Studies Quarterly Issue 32, July 2020, pp. 3-20 Introduction: Silences and Denialism beyond Mass Killings DOI:10.24193/csq.32.1 Zimbabwe’s state instigated Gukurahundi Published First Online: 05 July 2020 mass killings resulted in the death of around 3 Conϔlict Studies Quarterly 20 000 people between 1983 and 1987 in the Matabeleland and Midlands Provinces (Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice [CCJP], 1997; Auret, 1992; Phimister, 2008). The overwhelming majority of the Gukurahundi victims belonged to the Ndebele ethnic group while the North Korean trained the Fifth Brigade, a Shona people dominated military outit, were the main perpetrators of the mass killings. The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front – ZANU (PF) – led government ostensibly established the brigade to quell dissident activities being perpetrated by renegade soldiers from the national army who were allegedly afiliated to the main opposition, the Patriotic Front-Zimbabwe African People’s Union – (PF) ZAPU. The Gukurahundi massacres ended with the signing of the Unity Accord between then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe and the (PF) ZAPU leader, Dr. Joshua Nkomo, on 22 December 1987. The government declared a blanket amnesty for the protagonists, especially the armed combatants on both sides of the divide. The accord was an elite bargain that disregarded the wounded humanity of the constitutive political other. It side-lined the aspirations and ignored the pains of the ordinary Ndebele men and women in the villages who had borne the brunt of the Gukurahundi violence mainly because after the cessation of hostilities the government refused to have open and community initiated conversations on the massacres. Key state political actors implored society to let bygones be bygones by considering the Unity Accord to be an unimpeachable peace-building act. Subsequent to the Unity Accord, oficial responses to the Gukurahundi massacres became an amalgam of silence and denial. Some state security establishment members that masterminded Gukuruhundi either downplayed the massacres by claiming the killings were an inevitable but unfortunate outcome of conlict or out-rightly denied culpability for the killings. Thus what conversations on Gukurahundi that took place in the country between 1988 and the end of President Robert Mugabe’s rule in November 2017 were eclectic victims` monologues. The police regularly arrested artists that attempted to represent the Gukurahundi massacres through songs, paintings and plays for trying to disturb what the state arbitrarily deined as public peace and morality. These obstruc- tions disregarded survivors’ wounded humanity because in the aftermath of massacres harmed communities embolden themselves and coalesce their fractured senses of self by memorialising their collective suffering through commemorations, songs, dramas, paintings and the assembling of monuments. Halbwachs (quoted in Beristain, Paez, & González, 2000, p. 128) aptly argues that remembering is a normative process that allows people to have a personal and social identity. Thus by means of memorials, commemorations and rituals, reviving bonds with the deceased conirms a person’s social identity and is a step towards re-appropriation of the past which supports a moral self-deinition. The police and state security agencies also refused Gukurahundi survivors to properly inter their dead. These inhibitions disorient a people because “…participation in funeral rites and social sharing not only helps to enhance social 4 Issue 32, July 2020 integration and restore one’s self-concept and self-esteem, but also to foster collective memory” (Beristain et al., 2000, p. 119). The Zimbabwean government’s concerted efforts at silencing and obstructing Gukurahundi memorialisations re-traumatised survivors, I argue, by forcing them to sublimate their pains instead of letting them off through memorialisations, renditions and re-narrations. Silence and denial over atrocities are time buying strategies by the perpetrators which would make survivor claims lose afirmative potency (Ricouer, 2006). Denialism is a technique of erasure, a default mode for negating the sense- making function of memory and other commemorative processes. In interrogating the Gukurahundi silences and denialism, this article is informed by David Moshman`s four-phase theory on genocide which posits denial as the last stage of mass killings. In fact, “denial accompanies and follows genocide so routinely as to constitute its normative inal phase” (Moshman, 2007, p. 126). The methods of genocide denial range from total rejection of the facts to more subtle means such as reluctance to investigate and unpack the intricacies of massacres; selective remembering of the past; re-contextualizing historical circumstances to render culpable actions normal, understandable, or inevitable; and educating children with textbooks selectively aimed at instilling rectilinear patriotism. Perpetrators and participants in acts of mass harm oftentimes deny their culpability because of the inherent desires of human beings to self-deine and self-present as moral agents. Oftentimes, these perpetrators, especially when ensconced in the portals of state power, expect victims to overlook the pains of the past in the spirit of national unity and progress. In reality, for survivors the past is never past because they continue a tormented or anguished existence lived along side death, pain, destruction and denial. Thus, if possible, a sense of tragedy should be allowed to linger on in survivor communities. The following parts of this article are divided into several sections. The irst two sections, interrogate the historical and political dimensions of Gukurahundi and explain how it unfolded in the Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces. The subsequent sections ana- lyse state strategies of silencing the memories of the Gukurahundi atrocities that range from denials, obfuscation, intimidation, and legal restrictions from compensating and recognising victimhood. The Mugabe government frustrated the Gukurahundi harmed communities by denying them space and opportunities to re-member and re-heal their communities. In the aftermath of massacres harmed communities embolden themselves and coalesce their fractured senses of self by memorialising their collective suffering through commemorations, songs, dramas, paintings and the assembling of monuments. The Gukurahundi Massacres in Historical Context The Gukurahundi massacres were symptomatic of the pervasive incapacity of post- colonial African states to manage and withstand political diversity. Driven by the cal- 5 Conϔlict Studies Quarterly culus of destroying political opponents, the ZANU (PF) led government unleashed the Fifth Brigade into the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces a mere three years after independence in 1983. This intervention was ostensibly meant to quell dissident activities perpetrated by disgruntled ex-Zimbabwe People`s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) ighters deserting from the national army due to fears of persecution caused by the biased reintegration process into the new post-colonial Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA). The ZIPRA men who did not escape from the country were either killed or endured ill-treatment in the ZNA especially after the expulsion from government of their (PF) ZAPU leadership in 1982 and 1983. These expulsions followed the discovery of arms caches on (PF) ZAPU properties and farms. There is controversy on the circumstances leading to the presence of the aforesaid

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